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Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION BLY | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Author Notes
Carol Bly is the author of many books, including the story collection "My Lord Bag of Rice", the essay collection "Letters from the Country", & a book about writing short fiction, "The Passionate, Accurate Story". Bly currently teaches Ethics-in-Literature at the University of Minnesota. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Bly's second collection of short stories ( Backbone ) portrays Midwesterners living in the Twin Cities area whose seemingly unremarkable lives are altered by tragedy or by revelation. Abuse and responsibility to others are often examined: in ``My Lord Bag of Rice,'' a woman liberated by her abusive husband's death opens a boardinghouse where she hopes to assemble a warm, family-like group of tenants; ``The Tender Organizations'' concerns an Episcopal rector's wife and a nurse who take action against a woman who refuses her cruel and cancer-stricken husband his painkillers; in ``Amends,'' the younger sister of a murdered girl is given scholarship money by a woman with secret insights into the crime. The title story involves a husband and wife enthralled by a more worldly couple until they learn that their friends' superiority masks unhappiness and perceived failings. Bly's characterizations are believable, her observations accurate, her prose alternately lighthearted and solemn. These eight solid tales of basic emotions and situations are unified by common themes of marriage, education, love and death, and told from diverse, always sympathetic points of view. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
From author of the well-received nonfiction Letters from the Country (1981), here are eight leisurely stories alluringly sharp in their observations but edging toward the platitudinous in the faintly sweet uplift of their messages. In ""The Tomcat's Wife,"" a rural small-town housewife sees through the smug falseness of an out-of-town psychologist--but then so does the reader, this psychologist being little more than a two-dimensional straw man set up for a fall. The story groans under the weight of its less-than-subtle conflict between local goodness and big-city badness, but it's redeemed by Bly's otherwise observant and penetrating wit in taking stock of these lives (the jokes of local men ""did not have to be especially funny; the point was to keep up a jeering level to prevent self-pity""). In ""My Lord Bag of Rice,"" the widow of a crude husband opens a boardinghouse in St. Paul and finds whole new realms of possibility and promise in her life; while in ""After the Baptism"" and ""The Tender Organizations,"" symbols of hope and human redemption rise up after deaths by cancer--in one case through the unexpected monologue of an eccentric widow, in the other through the inner monologue of an oft-beaten old dog that's been rescued by a generously good-hearted (and newly pregnant) rector's wife. Bly sails close to the winds of the melodramatic and saccharine in these stories of plain lives, but her intellectual curiosity, in general, keeps her out of the shallows, as does her Chaucerian objectivity in seldom failing to find some good in the worst of sorts. An unconvincingly upbeat note ends the poverty-and-privilege explorations of ""The Ex-Class Agent""; the residents of a retirement home in Duluth organize to collect a bad debt (""A Committee of the Whole""); and the longish and several-charactered sociology of a withering northern Minnesota town (""Amends"") bas plenty of social-realism allure even without the murder of a pregnant high-school girl (from the wrong side of town) to pull it along. Capable stories from the world of Garrison Keillor: familiar but pleasantly substantial ruminations. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
